1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording medium on which digital data having audio information and video information is recorded in a rewritable state, and a recording apparatus and a reproduction apparatus for such a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
As recording media on which digital data is recorded in a rewritable state, mini discs (MD) are conventionally known. An MD has a recording capacity of 140 MB. An MD carries digital audio data recorded in a compressed state, so that audio information lasting about 75 minutes can be recorded on the MD. Many of users who have bought a music CD wish to record music information consisting of ten or more pieces recorded on the CD on an MD. This style of listening to music information recorded on an MD has been widely spreading.
With the recent progress of the optical disc technology, a rewritable recording medium having a large capacity, such as a DVD-RAM (digital versatile disc random access memory), has been developed. A DVD-RAM has a recording capacity of 4.7 GB, which is 30 times or more as large as that of an MD. While an MD can only carry music information consisting of ten or so pieces, a DVD-RAM can carry music information consisting of a hundred or more pieces.
Due to recent wide-spread Internet technology, music distribution by so-called electronic commerce (EC) is gaining popularity, where users retrieve favorite music data from a home page by downloading via their personal computers and settle the account by a settling means such as a credit card. By combining such a music distribution via Internet (hereinafter, referred to as an electronic music distribution) with the DVD-RAM, an environment in which users can easily record a huge amount of music data on one recording medium has been gradually realized.
However, the conventional recording media have the following problems.
An MD has only one information unit which defines the reproduction order of music data recorded on the MD (i.e., a table of contents (TOC)). Such a TOC is used to define the reproduction order of all music data recorded on the MD. Therefore, it is not possible to define the reproduction order of only specific music data among all the music data recorded on the MD.
Some reproduction apparatuses used for reproducing information from an MD have a program reproduction function capable of reproducing only selected specific music data in a predetermined order. Such an order of music data programmed using the program reproduction function is held in the reproduction apparatus only temporarily, and is deleted when the disc is replaced with another one. Therefore, the user must program the reproduction order of music data and the like whenever the disc is reproduced.
Since a large number of music data are recorded on a large-capacity recording medium such as a DVD-RAM, the user finds difficulty in identifying the respective music data recorded on the recording medium. For example, it is considerably troublesome for the user to select a plurality of music data from a recording medium carrying a hundred or so music data and define the reproduction order of the selected plurality of music data.